


peace and quiet and open air

by bastaerd



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Living Together, M/M, Post-Rescue, Self-Doubt, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27886531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: Edward gestures broadly to the yard.“It will take some work,” he says with the characteristic stiffness about him that appears when he’s unsure of his reception, “to tame the garden, but the interior is handsome, I assure you.”
Relationships: Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little
Comments: 13
Kudos: 48





	peace and quiet and open air

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so, here's the thing. the first ~800 words of this are actually the first i ever wrote for this fandom, but then i started writing [certainty](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24587098) instead. a couple of weeks ago i found it in my drafts, thought, huh, that's neat, and the other day i decided to finish it. it turned into kind of an extrapolation about the hypothetical future nedboy imagines in [never far](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26044090)?  
> title yoinked from "Somewhere" from _West Side Story._  
>  thank you my beautiful lovely friend [Phoebe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carnus) for editing!!!

Underneath Thomas’ trousers, the wound on his thigh has scarred over anew. It pulls oddly as he walks, following just a pace or two behind Edward as they make their way up the thin walkway, framed with flower beds on either side. The house they approach is modest in its size, but the exterior is well-maintained, and the garden that sprawls out around it (and well into the countryside) is beautifully kept. As they near the door, Edward gestures broadly to the yard.

“It will take some work,” he says with the characteristic stiffness about him that appears when he’s unsure of his reception, “to tame the garden, but the interior is handsome, I assure you.”

It hadn’t occurred to Thomas in the first place to criticize the state of the garden. In fact, if this is its unkempt state, he feels heartened that it takes such little effort to maintain its beauty. It will give them both that much more time to do things other than tend to it.

“I hadn’t thought a thing of it,” he replies, and when he turns to give Edward a polite smile, he sees that the man’s face is pinched, as if he’s holding his breath. Thomas places a hand against the back of Edward’s arm, and they continue on, Edward pulling a key from his pocket and unlocking the front door. He enters first, holding the door open for Thomas and resting his hand on his back as he follows. The door falls shut behind them as he lets it go, and leaves the two of them separated from the outside. Though they had still been alone and out of sight on the way up the walk, as far from metropolitan life as they were, this extra degree of seclusion-- of privacy-- is liberating. It frees Thomas enough so that he makes to pull Edward nearer to him, to take a moment with him close, but the man steps away and turns as if caught by something.

“The kitchen has a lovely view,” he says over his shoulder, and then his brow furrows in uncertainty as his eyes find Thomas’. “At least, I thought so, when I came to purchase the place.”

He leads again, moving too quickly for Thomas’ taste through the dining room (too small to entertain more than a few people at a time, but only a few is the full capacity between the two of them) but he lets himself be guided to the kitchen. It does have a lovely view; the row of tall windows on the wall opposite the door looks out over that same yard about which Edward had been apologetic. Seeing it again brings that same pinched look to Edward’s face.

“Which is precisely why I find the yard in want of rehabilitation,” he assures Thomas. “It will encroach on our privacy, but I can call for a gardener to come in the next week.”

“That’s quite alright,” Thomas assures him right back, and then hurries to keep up on the way to the next room.

Edward leads him on a tour of the house. It has two bedrooms, one in which neither of them intend to spend much time, and a lavatory between them with a claw-footed tub large enough for two. There is also a comfortably furnished sitting room, with large windows hidden by lush drapes. The place will be beautiful in the lighter months, Thomas thinks to himself, and imagines himself sitting in one of the two chairs by the windows, reading a book or mending a cuff.

Edward, on the other hand, has found something for which to apologize in every room. Each time the two of them walk through a door, he winces and makes assurances that the room is up to snuff despite the flaw he perceives, flaws that must be imperceptible to the naked eye. He promises Thomas so sincerely that his enjoyment of the place will only be temporarily impacted, while Thomas had been unaware his enjoyment is to be impacted at all, and when they finally arrive again in the sitting room, Thomas has to stop him before he starts to apologize the ground right out from under their feet.

“Edward,” he says, placing one hand on Edward’s shoulder to stop him in place and the other on the opposite shoulder to turn him so that they are facing each other. “I might as well call you Commander Little, if it will get you to listen to me.”

He has enjoyed the tour. The yard is lovely, no matter what it has growing in it, and will be lovelier come spring and summer when things are not so dry and dying. Will wildflowers grow out there? He certainly hopes so, because he has never seen any, to his knowledge, except in illustrations in books, and he has designs of going out and picking a bouquet for their dining room table. Already, the thought of sitting there for breakfast, across from one another, or perhaps side by side, with Thomas pressed up against Edward so that they must each keep an arm around each other and eat one-handedly, sparks a warmth in his chest that flows outwards from his sternum all the way to his fingertips.

Edward, though, turns his eyes upon Thomas looking as though a storm cloud has passed over his face. He is caught mid-apology, this time about the state of the curtains (too heavy to let much light in, a problem solved by simply opening them) when Thomas interrupts him, and now stands there like a student about to be reprimanded in front of the class. He casts his gaze down to the floor and waits for his tongue-lashing.

“Are you planning to insult this place from floor to ceiling?” Thomas asks. “The poor house, all it’s done is stand here.”

“I hadn’t meant to insult it,” Edward replies. “All I’m- There’s work to be done, is all.”

“It seems just fine to me.”

“Just fine,” Edward repeats to himself, as though that is the worst thing it could possibly be.  _ Just fine. _ Thomas is reminded, briefly, of the word  _ close. _ “It should be more than fine. I will make a list of what’s to be done, and hire a gardener in the meantime. If you will bear with me for a month, perhaps two, if it takes as long, Tom-”

“Then what? You’ll have whipped this place into shape, like a captain sentencing a crewman to an introduction with the cat?”

“Yes.” The word sighs out of Edward as if expelled from a bellows. The force is such that it renders Thomas dumbfounded, and he blinks in surprise while Edward struggles to elaborate. “Oh, come, Tom. The house is… is fine, as you said, for any other man-”

“Would you live here?” Thomas regards him with raised eyebrows, knowing he has caught him in his own logic. For all of Edward’s better qualities and as good as his intentions may be, he does have a tendency towards hypocrisy. Thomas has often wondered what Edward would say, were he to meet an exact replica who acted and spoke and thought in a way identical to himself; indecision might then be called thoughtfulness, and poor judgment taken within the context of the information at hand. More likely he would keep his eyes forward and keep walking, and reserve his social energies for more desperate times.

“Well, yes,” says Edward, balking. “But that’s not the-”

“Isn’t it, though?” Thomas asks back, feeling almost guilty for cornering him in such a way, but not so guilty as to stop him. “You’re going to be living here, same as I am.”

At this, Edward looks as though he has only just considered the fact. Thomas wonders what the house is for, then, if not for the two of them to live together. Perhaps the commander had anticipated keeping Thomas there, providing for him in a little house out in the countryside but never residing there himself.

“You…” he begins, only to stop, wet his lips. “Really?” He sounds genuinely surprised, so much so that it startles a laugh from Thomas.

“I thought you’d bought the place for that very reason,” he says. “So that the two of us might have a home, safe from prying eyes and wagging tongues.”

He looks to the sitting room, then to the dining room, through which he spies the kitchen again, light splashing the floor in the shape of the window. When he had come to view the property, did Edward imagine, as Thomas does now, a sunlit future? Had he seen the phantoms of himself and Thomas having their meals together, sitting by the fireplace, laying in their bed--  _ their _ bed, built to fit two so they would make the choice to cling tight to one another despite having room to spare-- and decide that he could call the place a home? Thomas had. He had once called a tent a home, because Edward had been there beside him. He would have called nothing at all home for him.

Had Edward, too, called that canvas, barely a shelter for all it let in the wind, home? Had Thomas made it one?

“I did!” Edward exclaims, eyes wide, stepping towards Thomas, his hands going to his forearms and gripping them. His eyes search his face, and, belatedly, Thomas realizes that the passing pall of doubt must have shown there and left Edward desperate to dispel it. “I intended for this house to be ours, Tom, a place for the two of us. I wanted-” Here, he gives a bitter little scoff.

Thomas prods him. “You wanted?”

“I  _ wanted _ it to be perfect for you,” Edward answers. With a sigh, he adds, “I realize now that it’s not just the place that I wanted to be perfect for you.”

It takes a moment for Thomas to work through the wording, but once he does, his shoulders drop from their posture, and he pinches his lips into a thin line.  _ Of course you’ve been perfect, _ he wishes to say, if only it weren’t a lie, and he despises the thought of any untruths between them. Besides that, he finds that Edward’s imperfections are something he cherishes. Part of it stems from the fact that he is a steward; he deals in imperfections, buffs them to a shine. Perfection would have him out of a job.

His thoughts go, then, to the shale. A perfect man would never have left him. Edward had. He had also returned, and a perfect man would not have had to make that decision, weighing his options while already on his way out and deciding to turn around, putting his back to the possibility of rescue in favor of certain death beside Thomas. A perfect man might have stayed with him, but would never have turned back for him; a perfect man might have held him and agonized his parched throat to make promises he could barely understand, but by that point,  _ here _ was better than perfect.

But neither of them will die in a tent in a place where no Englishman should have set foot. They’ll die warm and well-fed, tucked into their wide bed with its soft, clean sheets, and they will go in their sleep, their eyes already closed. And they may even die together. Does Edward know that he has afforded them this option, or has he thought only of the immediate future, tucked away with an overgrown garden and thick curtains and a sun-bleached kitchen?

Thomas turns his arms, breaks Edward’s grasp on them so that he can hold his hands softly, rough palms against rough palms. He remembers the first brush of those hands against his, back on Terror; it had been sometime during those few weeks of the captain’s convalescence, Thomas emboldened by his own exhaustion as he had caught Edward’s fingers. He had held them, if only for a moment before remembering himself, but he recalls as clearly as if he had a portrait drawn up of it the then-lieutenant’s face, eyes round with surprise, mouth frozen ajar as it is now. They had only ever wanted to be enough for each other.

“I thought,” says Thomas, voice low, words even as he holds the weight of their joined hands, “that our months on the rocks proved that we’re beyond something so menial as perfection. It proved it for me, at least. You could’ve brought me out into the woods and I would’ve called it home sweet home.”

One eyebrow cocked, he regards Edward as if to say  _ Wouldn’t you agree? _ and Edward only blinks. That is alright. “You know why that is, don’t you?” Thomas asks him.

Edward’s lips form the shape of some word, but he closes his mouth and remains silent, waiting for Thomas to finish.

“Because sometimes home is more than a place,” he explains gently, with a squeeze of Edward’s hands to help him put the pieces together. An idea strikes him then, and he gives those hands a tug, beckoning Edward as he steps backwards.

“Tom?”

“You took me on a tour of the house,” Thomas explains, moving in earnest now towards the sitting room. “Now it’s my turn.”

Walking backwards nearly has him smacking into the doorframe, having misjudged its width, but Edward’s hand on his shoulder stops him before he can hit the wall. Warmth flutters in Thomas’ chest, and in return, he tucks a flyaway back into place from where it has strayed from its styling to tickle Edward’s brow.

After they have successfully navigated themselves into the room, minding the doorway, Thomas drops Edward’s hands and goes to the windows. “These’ll let the sunlight in nicely, especially in the summertime,” he says. “The light is good enough to read by, or to mend things. In the evenings, after we’ve had dinner, we’ll draw the curtains and sit until we’re good and tired.”

As he makes his way around the room, musing aloud about the sofa and the chairs and how to fit two grown men onto each of them, Edward’s perplexion fades, little by little. His eyes follow Thomas where he goes, and when he catches them, Thomas stops behind a tall-backed armchair and leans forward into it.

“I’ll pour you your drink here, and hand you your pipe.”

“I’ll offer it to you first,” Edward replies, a small smile teasing lopsidedly at the corner of his mouth so that Thomas has to fight the urge to kiss it from him.

“And I’ll refuse, and then steal it from you a moment later.”

They make their way through the rooms again in this manner, with Thomas leading the way and Edward following, smoothing the uglinesses Edward had detected into something pleasant. Every time he seems poised to apologize, which Thomas can sense in the same way that Mr. Blanky had been able to read the ice, Thomas points at something and spins a memory off of it.

“We’ll come down here in the mornings, after I’ve dressed and shaved us,” he decides in the dining room, gesturing towards the head of the table and then to the spot next to it. “You’ll sit here, and I beside you. We’ll take our breakfast, after I’ve brought out the tea.”

“I’ll find a new tea set for you,” Edward promises in a voice much too solemn for porcelain.

“I don’t doubt you will. Now, come on, we’ve got rooms left to tour.” Thomas goes to him again, and Edward offers him a crooked arm. They go up the stairs that way, elbows interlocked so that they walk pressed into the warmth of each other’s sides, close enough so that the narrow staircase poses no issue. At last, they come to the two bedrooms, one for appearances and the other for themselves. Already, Thomas has picked out the easterly of the two for their usage; its large bed sits framed by two windows, so that the sun might wake them with its warmth and remind them of where they are.

He sits on the edge of that bed, and Edward, still within arms’ reach even when they are not holding each other in some way, follows. “We’ll fall asleep here at night and wake here in the morning,” Thomas tells him, smoothing a hand over the comforter. A quilt lies folded at the foot, and though he doubts they will need it tonight, he knows they will end up pulling it up to their chins, one more reminder that they don’t have to suffer the cold anymore. He calls to mind the image of Edward’s sleeping face, the worried lines in his brow smoothed to faint creases, his jaw slack, and imposes it here against the fluffy pillows. “I’ll wake before you-”

“Of course.”

“-but I’ll stay in bed for longer, so as not to disturb you,” Thomas goes on, cheeks dimpling. “Hours longer, even, though at some point I might grow bored and shake you awake.” He looks forward to the opportunity to brush dark hair from Edward’s eyes, skimming his cheeks with his fingertips lightly enough not to wake him but enough so that he will wrinkle his nose at the tickle of it. Later, he will watch Edward’s eyes open, glassy from sleep, and make sure that his first waking memory is that of a kiss. The Edward who sits before him now pulls a small smile, his eyes on Thomas’ knees.

“This is the closest to putting a ring on your finger that I can give you,” he tells him quietly. “I would go into town to buy one right now, if I could.”

“Your family would wonder where you found a wife,” Thomas points out, and Edward scoffs.

“They would wonder more about the ring than about that,” he replies. “They’ve known for a long time, whether they came to the conclusion consciously or not, that they would never see me bring a wife into the family.”

Edward’s hand finds his on the bed and takes it to sweep his thumb across Thomas’ knuckles. It lingers on his ring finger, bare. Once, it was thought that there lived a vein in that finger which led directly to the heart, and Thomas thinks that if he closes his eyes, he might feel Edward’s pulse matching his own, steady like the rolling of waves. During their years at sea, their gaits changed to compensate for the motion, anticipating it on an instinctual level so that they moved across the deck gracefully as dancers. When they walked off the ships, they would stumble drunkenly from side to side, unbalanced on solid ground, feeling it pitch when it didn’t.

“If this is your proposal,” Thomas says, “in as much as capacity as it can be, then I accept it.”

Though he cannot see Edward’s eyes at this angle, he sees his eyebrows go up, and has the idea that he has just touched upon the very thought in Edward’s mind, and feels almost giddy for it. He purses his lips, sucks them through his teeth to school his expression. Edward does not, but keeps his eyes averted, as though that will keep him inscrutable.

“We can’t be married,” he says.

“I know that.”

“I couldn’t give you a ring.”

“I don’t want one.”

“You might-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” Thomas takes his face in both of his hands-- he is clean-shaven nowadays, reminded too easily, as Thomas is, by seemingly innocuous things of their long walk-- and forces him to look up, if not to see his eyes then so that Edward can see his. While he keeps his averted, even now, Thomas can read in them something delicate and hopeful. Something rare, something that he wants to kindle. “‘I might’ nothing. I might stay here for the rest of my life, with you. This is what you’re asking, isn’t it?”

At this, Edward nods as much as he is able, with Thomas’ hands framing his face such as they are. “Yes,” he breathes, warming Thomas’ wrists with the word. “I am, Tom, yes.”

“Then let’s dispense with perfect. We don’t need it, not when we have something already so much better.”

“And what might that be?”

“Home.”

He draws Edward’s face to him, kisses the bow of his lips. “We’re home,” he says again, nose pressed to Edward’s cheek and Edward’s against his, and means that they are, both  _ finally _ and  _ to each other. _

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://edward-little.tumblr.com).


End file.
